Take the slop to moltbook.
Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
661–670 of 1001 posts
Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#662Good. This helps establish it in the HN culture. That’s the purpose of guidelines. 99% of rule enforcement, both IRL and online, comes down to individuals accepting the culture. Rules aren’t really for adversaries, they are for ordinary situations. Adversaries are dealt with differently.
This discussion reminds me of the Paradigms of Power featured in Adiamante by L E Modisett; about consensus, power, morality and society. It’s a good read.
Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#663This list of Do and Don'ts now reads like a bad Claude.md file to me.
Don't insinuate that someone else must have broken that. It was you.
Do run the linter
Don't commit throw-away code
Do write a test case
Don't write a comment describing every single function
Seriously, run the linter. And fix the issues.
It is your fault.Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#664I'm absolutely 100% for this policy. My only caution is that good writers and LLMs look very similar, because LLMs were trained on a corpus of good writers. Good writers use semicolons and em-dashes. Sometimes we used bulleted lists or Oxford commas. So we should make sure to follow that other HN rule, and assume the person on the other end is a good faith actor, and be cautious about accusing someone of using AI. (I…
If you're looking for the odd visual artifact or textual tic then you're fighting a cat and mouse game that will change by the month. It's either easy to identify the soul of the human or it's not.
Text is extremely lossy and non-deterministic, so it's not often possible to find evidence of humanity in it
Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#665What a welcome post. The whole reason I come here is to get thoughtful input from smart people, and not what I could get myself from an LLM. While we are at it; Think your own thoughts as well :) I know how easy it is to "let it come up with a first draft" and not spend the real effort of thinking for yourself on questions, but you'll find it's a road to perdition if you let yourself slip into the habit. Thanks to al…
Totally agree with you. I come here to read comments made by humans. If I need to read comments made by AI Bots I would go to Twitter or reddit, both made me not read the comments section entirely.
Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#666[dead]
Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#667I'm absolutely 100% for this policy. My only caution is that good writers and LLMs look very similar, because LLMs were trained on a corpus of good writers. Good writers use semicolons and em-dashes. Sometimes we used bulleted lists or Oxford commas. So we should make sure to follow that other HN rule, and assume the person on the other end is a good faith actor, and be cautious about accusing someone of using AI. (I…
Good writers use semicolons and em-dashes. Sometimes we used bulleted lists or Oxford commas. - You seem to have a rather high opinion of your own writing :-) - Why the mix of tense (use/used)? - Oxford commas are a monstrosity
"Used" seems to be a typo.
Being anti-Oxford comma is baffling. It's almost zero extra effort and reduces confusion.
Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#668I'm absolutely 100% for this policy. My only caution is that good writers and LLMs look very similar, because LLMs were trained on a corpus of good writers. Good writers use semicolons and em-dashes. Sometimes we used bulleted lists or Oxford commas. So we should make sure to follow that other HN rule, and assume the person on the other end is a good faith actor, and be cautious about accusing someone of using AI. (I…
>My only caution is that good writers and LLMs look very similar, because LLMs were trained on a corpus of good writers.
While that might be ideal, is that really the case with most LLM training data? Does the curation process weed out all the slop from bad writers?
Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#669Honest question, why were folks posting AI generated comments in the first place? There's such a high inertia to comment. I only comment when I have something to contribute OR find something incredibly interesting. So I'm just baffled, why anyone was using AI to generate comments. Like what was the incentive driving the behavior?
Internet points.
which can then translate to real-world money points
Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#670I'm absolutely 100% for this policy. My only caution is that good writers and LLMs look very similar, because LLMs were trained on a corpus of good writers. Good writers use semicolons and em-dashes. Sometimes we used bulleted lists or Oxford commas. So we should make sure to follow that other HN rule, and assume the person on the other end is a good faith actor, and be cautious about accusing someone of using AI. (I…
I don't really think that good writing and LLM writing looks all that similar. It's not always easy to spot (and maybe HN users aren't always doing a great job at it), but even the best LLM output tends to have an "LLM smell" to it that's hard to avoid. Like, sure, LLM writing is almost always grammatically correct, spelled correctly, formatted correctly, etc., which tends to be true of good writing. But there's a ce…
> I don't really think that good writing and LLM writing looks all that similar.
How do you know?